John Soyring Speaks to the Class of 2012

John Soyring was the keynote speaker at the Mechanical Engineering - Engineering Mechanics Department Senior Awards Banquet on April 17, 2012.

After graduating from Michigan Tech with a BSEE in 1976, the L'Anse, Michigan native John Soyring joined IBM. During his 36 career with IBM, he has held a variety of technical, professional, managerial and executive positions within the company.

Soyring was involved in global business leadership for a multi-billion dollar annual revenue portion of the IBM software business. This role included functional leadership for strategy, research & development, marketing & sales, business development, product support, and services related to the IBM offerings that include: software solutions for enterprises in 17 global industries; IBM System z software products; and a set of software solutions related to emerging technologies, such as: RFID, new retailing solutions and speech recognition.

He is a member of the Industry Advisory Council of the American Indian Science & Engineering Society (AISES). He is also a member of the Industry Advisory Board of Michigan Technological University.

In addition to John’s normal IBM duties, he has successfully lobbied members of the US congress to support the normalization of trade with both China and Singapore. John was also involved with IBM’s work to convince the Chinese Communist Party to allow citizen’s of the People’s Republic of China to have access to the internet.